For former Vice President Joe Biden, the 2020 presidential campaign has been focused primarily on one question: Who is best to beat President Donald Trump?

His campaign's answer: Joe Biden is.

But, in an interview for a podcast with the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart, Biden seemed on the verge of undermining his own camp's argument in favor of his electability relative to the rest of the 2020 Democratic primary field.

Capehart, an opinion writer for the Post who is also African American, asked Biden whether he believes that it’s “gonna take an old white person to beat an old white person” and “old school against old school” when discussing the African American community's concern over Trump’s re-election.

Biden responded: “They’d be looking for someone who maybe done them as good a chance of beating Trump, but understands the problems and the opportunities that they face.”

“... when the assertion is made that ... well, the reason the only person that can beat Trump is, “an old white guy.” I just think that ... I think there’s other people in the race who can beat Trump,” Biden continued.

“Who?” Capehart asked.

“Well, I think almost anybody,” Biden answered. “They’d all make a better president than Trump, no matter who’s left in the race.”

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2019/08/30/joe-biden-i-think-almost-anybody-could-beat-donald-trump-2020/2168099001/

By Elizabeth Warren August 27 at 1:06 PM

The Federal Communications Commission reports that a staggering 21.3 million Americans don’t have access to high-speed broadband — no doubt an underestimate given the notorious loopholes in FCC reporting requirements. This is despite more than a decade of efforts by policymakers at the state and federal level to end the “digital divide” and deliver universal access to high-speed Internet.
This isn’t an accident. Blame Internet service providers (ISPs), such as Verizon, Comcast, AT&T and Charter, which have maximized their profits at the expense of rural towns, cities, low-income communities and communities of color across the country.

These companies have deliberately restricted competition, kept prices high and used their armies of lobbyists to persuade state legislatures to ban towns and cities from building their own public networks. Meanwhile, the federal government has shoveled more than a billion in taxpayer dollars per year to private ISPs to expand broadband to remote areas, but these providers have done the bare minimum with these resources.

ISPs have been able to get away with fostering pseudo-monopolies because they spend a lot of money to keep the regulatory environment and the conversation surrounding it murky. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer, has been an effective agent for ISPs. He led the charge to dismantle net neutrality last year, and he has done everything in his power to stop municipalities from building their own broadband infrastructure. He also attempted to gut the FCC’s Lifeline program, one of the few tools the federal government has to provide Internet to low-income consumers. While the profit motives of ISPs have disproportionately harmed rural and low-income communities, urban and higher-income consumers have been adversely impacted, too.
[snip]

Enough is enough. As president, I would work to ensure every home in the United States has an affordable, broadband connection. I have a plan for a new public option for broadband Internet, carried out by a new Office of Broadband Access that would manage an $85 billion federal grant program. Only electricity and telephone cooperatives, nonprofit organizations, tribes, cities, counties and other state subdivisions would be eligible for grants.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/elizabeth-warren-heres-how-we-get-broadband-internet-to-rural-america/2019/08/27/adc63c4e-c5c8-11e9-9986-1fb3e4397be4_story.html

That could make her the candidate to beat in the 2020 primaries.

Former Vice President Joe Biden has been the frontrunner of the Democratic primary race so far, but he's at risk of losing his spot at the top to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the progressive firebrand senator.

Warren, who entered the race last December, has experienced a meteoric rise in basically every possible metric. She's up in Democratic primary polls, approval rating, fundraising, and even crowd size, while Biden's support and favorability are dwindling down over time.
[snip]
But in the following months, Warren proved her detractors wrong by fully embracing the role of the policy wonk. She's released a unique and detailed policy plan to address almost every imaginable issue from the cost of college to the opioid crisis, rolling out so many policies that "I've got a plan for that" has become her unofficial slogan.

While her choice to eschew private fundraisers was initially seen as a huge liability, not courting wealthy donors has enabled Warren to spend more time on the campaign trail, where she has thrived.

And on the eve of the next narrowed-down Democratic primary debate, Warren appears to be overtaking Sen. Bernie Sanders as the 2020 field's progressive standard-bearer, while Biden's stronghold on the race is fading fast.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elizabeth-warren-becoming-candidate-to-beat-2019-8

Over the weekend, Elizabeth Warren spoke in front of 15,000 people at a campaign rally in Seattle, Washington.
It was, by her campaign's estimates, the single largest crowd the Massachusetts Senator has drawn in her nearly year-long quest to be the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. (The 15,000 number came from Warren's campaign so take it with a grain of salt. But it's clear from the photos there were a WHOLE lot of people there.)

And, the Seattle crowd wasn't an anomaly. In St. Paul, Minnesota last week, Warren's campaign estimated 12,000 people turned out to see her. She had an estimated 4,000 people at a town hall in Los Angeles earlier this month.

So, what does crowd size tell us -- exactly?

Well, that depends. Politicos will remember that in the late stages of the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney was convinced he was going to beat President Obama because -- at least in part -- the size of the crowds coming to his rallies. Romney didn't win -- or even come close.

On the other hand, the massive crowds that Obama was able to draw -- both as a surrogate for other candidates in the 2006 cycle and then in his own right as a presidential contender in 2008 -- were a telling indicator of the organic passion and energy he was creating within the electorate.
[snip]
When you factor in that context, Warren's crowds of late almost certainly are an indicator of genuine momentum and excitement surrounding her candidacy. No matter what any of her rivals might say behind closed doors (or in public) about what Warren's crowds mean (or don't mean), you can be sure that each and every one of them would LOVE to be able to draw in the numbers that the Massachusetts Senator is right now.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/26/politics/elizabeth-warren-crowd-size-2020/

But times have changed. Warren is now surging. She has plugged away with plans, retail campaigning (more than 45,000 selfies so far) and two solid debate performances. As a result, she's raked in $25 million (still without big-money fundraisers) and more than doubled her support (polling consistently second or third nationally). And on Sunday, she drew her largest crowd of the campaign yet — 15,000 in Seattle.

That even got the attention Monday of President Trump. Rising to his focus is perhaps one of the better weather vanes of who's doing well in the Democratic primary.

Surveys in some crucial early states also show Warren within striking distance — second place in Iowa, behind former Vice President Joe Biden and third in New Hampshire. But questions linger about her long-term chances, following Hillary Clinton's loss to Donald Trump in 2016.

Voters on the campaign trail continue to say they like Warren, but they aren't sure she can win. It's something researchers and Democratic strategists think she can get past, and they say her rise might be proving the naysayers wrong already.

"She's so good at explaining her ideas in a way that makes sense to the audience," said Karen Finney, a Democratic strategist who worked on the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and Stacey Abrams' Georgia bid for governor but is not currently affiliated with any presidential campaign. "And she's winning people over; the challenge will be all the money that will be spent to make her ideas sound scary."

https://www.npr.org/2019/08/28/754856480/warrens-on-the-rise-but-can-she-convince-democrats-she-can-beat-trump

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has been drawing increasingly large crowds as she campaigns for the Democratic nomination to run against President Donald Trump. And it’s not just her supporters who have noticed.
On Tuesday, Trump attacked Warren, claiming the media reports inflated her crowd size. Then, for good measure, he threw in his racist nickname for her:




Last weekend, Warren drew a crowd that her campaign estimated at 15,000 in Seattle. After the event, she spent hours posing for selfies with supporters who stood in a line that stretched around the park.

Although Trump still routinely packs arenas, he famously obsesses over his crowd sizes and often wildly inflates the number, especially when it comes to those gathered outside. Last year, for example, Trump claimed to have an overflow crowd of 45,000 people outside a rally in Missouri. However, a city official told CNN that “1,000 or so” were outside.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-elizabeth-warren-crowd-size_n_5d66062be4b01fcc690ba731

So, a poll that showed Biden getting only 19% support is an "irrational finding", as one poster called it, or an outlier to be discounted?

Or are these responses examples of confirmational bias, the tendency to interpret new evidence to conform to one's existing beliefs or theories?

I think the latter. People's expectation that Biden must continue to have at least 30% support is so strong, that they ignore any evidence to the contrary.

Is this Monmouth poll really THAT much of an outlier, having Biden at 19% support? No, not really -- unless one chooses to ignore several other recent polls showing Biden's support in the low 20% range.




That's EIGHT polls from FOUR different Pollsters just in AUGUST that show Biden's support not that different than the 19% he got in the Monmouth poll.

So are we to ignore 8 polls this month, 9 polls counting Monmouth, because they are ALL outliers? Or are we to think that the polling landscape is not as stable as some people would like to think?

We will have to wait until the actual voting to see how accurate the various polls really are, but we should at least stop saying "that's only one poll! it's an outlier!" when we choose, perhaps subconsciously, to ignore evidence to the contrary.

A day after a Monmouth University poll found longtime frontrunner Joe Biden trailing Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, an Emerson University poll has the former vice president on top by a comfortable margin.

Conducted between August 24th-26th with a 3.9 percent margin of error, the poll has 31 percent of Democratic primary voters favoring Biden, followed by Sanders (24 percent), Elizabeth Warren (15), Kamala Harris (10), and Andrew Yang (4). Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, and Tulsi Gabbard all drew 3 percent support; Beto O’Rourke drew 2 percent; and Amy Klobuchar, Julián Castro, and “Someone Else” all drew 1 percent. The rest of the field didn’t register a blip.

Though the 7-point gap between Biden and Sanders may seem like a comfortable margin, Emerson’s latest poll is yet another sign that Biden’s stranglehold on the primary may be weakening. Not only did Biden’s support drop 2 percentage points from the last time Emerson conducted a national poll in late July, Sanders gained 4 percentage points, closing the gap from 13 percentage points to 7 in less than a month.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/joe-biden-emerson-poll-877313/

While we were all focused on Biden in the Monmouth Poll, the CNN Poll, the Hill/HarrisX Poll, the Emerson Poll and the MorningConsult Poll, we all forgot to look at Sanders gaining ground.

According to the RCP Polls Tracker, Biden's AVERAGE lead in the polls is now down to just 8.1% over Sanders in second place.

As some better polls for Biden dropped off the tracker, his AVERAGE level of support is now 27.3% compared to the surging Sanders at 19.2%.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/2020_democratic_presidential_nomination-6730.html

Disclaimer: It is over 5 months until actual voting starts. No single poll's results should be overemphasized.

Well, I guess I was right when I said that the race for the 2020 Democratic Nomination remains wide open.
Biden no longer has a double digit lead over his nearest rival.

Is this a sign of things to come?

https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/1166419580954300416

https://twitter.com/IsaacDovere/status/1166414309196488705

I am of two minds on splitting the debate now. If it was 5-6 people on stage at a time, I think it would make for a better debate. But I would also like to see all the leading candidates on the same stage.

The random drawings for stage positions leave something to be desired.